Feature: The Problems of the Post-Racial Politician Operating in an Economic Downturn and Facing an Electorate Still Largely Segregated Along Lines of Class and Skin Color

Maybe not. But it is hard to understand exactly what in Nutter’s background somehow weakens his credentials as an African-American. He was raised in a two-story rowhome on the 5500 block of Larchwood Avenue in West Philadelphia. Nutter told me that his family — including his parents, his sister and a grandmother — was the third black family on the block when they arrived, but that most white families left soon after. The neighborhood was never as desperate as the worst bombed-out blocks of North Philadelphia, but it was no suburban paradise. There were gangs, drugs and violence.

Nutter’s late father, Basil DuBois Nutter Jr., was a salesman and plumber with a drinking problem who had a hard time keeping a steady job. His mother, Catalina, worked at Bell Telephone. Education was important to Nutter’s parents. They sent him to a local Catholic elementary school, and from there he got a scholarship to St. Joe’s Prep and went on to Penn, graduating with an undergraduate business degree from Wharton.

“Hell, there are lot of African-American men and women who came from the same background as Michael Nutter,” Singley says, “who grew up in the neighborhoods but who went to St. Joe’s Prep or the Wharton School. So the idea that he’s not representative of a meaningful slice of the community, it’s just absurd.”

Nor does the idea of Nutter being somehow unclear on his African-American identity square with the rest of his pre-political life, like his job at the Impulse nightclub at Erie and Germantown. In published profiles of Nutter, those disco days come across as a fleeting experiment, an endearing but brief dalliance with the city’s black nightlife scene that he cut off before getting back on the straight and narrow. But Nutter worked at the Impulse for nearly nine years. Long after graduation, when he was working days as a management trainee at Xerox, and later at a small brokerage firm, he’d turn up at the Impulse at night to spin records, restock bars, tote ice and hit on women.